“Got any cigarettes?4’ asked the cargo handler nearest him, an unshaven man with a tattered shirt and lightweight traveling pack.
Tal glanced at him. “No.”
The man blinked and said no more. He sat there for five more minutes, then got up slowly and moved to the other side of the room.
The doors slid open and four security guards entered. “Clinton, Emily?” asked one, and the only woman among the detainees stood up and followed the guard into one of the bank of interrogation cells lining the left end of the room.
“Diamond, Tal?” said the shortest of the security guards, a woman who could not be more than nineteen, with a mass of rough black hair pulled into a long mane of ponytail. The tattoo adorning her brown left cheek was a thing of incredibly delicacy: A coal-black stallion rearing up, and a red rose. From his attitude, the stallion seemed to be protecting the rose rather than crushing it. Tal recognized the official symbol of State Security for Baret Two’s current ruling family. He knew what was on his own forehead: JOHN, stationer’s slang for a passer-through. It wasn’t meant to be respectful.
Tal got to his feet. She jerked her head toward the cells on the right, and he followed her into the nearest and sat down at a bare table.
“Unusual name,” she remarked, taking the chair opposite.
“Not really.”
“For one of you people, I mean. From the City of Diamond, your name is Diamond—see? You’re not one of their royalty or something, are you?”
“They don’t have royalty.”
“That’s not the way I heard it. Doesn’t the Diamond have some big mucky-muck in charge?”
“Not in charge in a monarchical sense. And it’s not a hereditary post.”
“Well, not that I really give a shit. Why ‘they’?”
“Pardon?”
“You said ‘They don’t have royalty.’ Aren’t you one of them?”
He paused, very briefly. “I was born on the City of Pearl. You were talking about the Diamond.”
“Pearl, huh? We haven’t seen many of them here. I think you’re the first.”
“We don’t travel much.”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got a good accent for a Blood Christian.”
“Some of us go to school.”
The woman of the stallion and the rose looked at him sharply. There was something about his voice— This kid couldn’t be more than a teenager, and yet this was not the way an interview with a Cities hayseed ought to progress. In spite of what he said, could he be some VIP? Maybe she shouldn’t have called him a Blood Christian; she knew these Redemptionists didn’t like that. “No offense for the long detention. We wouldn’t want to let terrorists in, like Cathal Station, would we?”
He said, in a voice without inflection, “Firstly, the Three Cities have no great incentive to blow up your station. Secondly, if your scanners hadn’t passed me as harmless, I wouldn’t have been kept in your lounge for four whole hours. Thirdly, Cathal Station was destroyed by a longship on a suicide run, and two hundred crew had to die with her for it to work. I can assure you that I’m personally unacquainted with a hundred and ninety-nine such hardy souls, and I myself am definitely not one. I only have a sixteen-hour pass, officer; could we move this process along?”
Baret Security Officer Tersha had had a short, but not uneducated, life. Never in the course of it had she met anyone who could string a bunch of sentences together like that. It rolled out of this kid like it came straight from a book, with no passing through heart or mind or vocal cords.
She cleared her throat. “May I ask what you’re doing on Baret Station?” she said, striving to put more authority into her voice. This was her first month on the job, but she’d been on the Security track for the last four years of training. If he’d pulled out a weapon, she would have been able to handle it, but this … this undefined impression that she would never be able to explain in a written report …
“I’m a tourist,” said Tal Diamond.
Looking into his flat gray eyes, Officer Tersha suddenly remembered a line from an old song, something about loneliness and the weaponlike hardness of diamonds. It was supposed to be a song about space, but she saw it now in a new context.
It wasn’t this one’s easy assumption of authority, his taking for granted that he was in control and his apparent talent for forcing that point of view onto a situation. Much worse was the tone of voice, the rhythm of his speech. That was what was throwing her off-stride. It was bloodless, it was mechanically precise; but behind it and through it was a kind of jaded exhaustion, a just-plain tiredness, that was frighteningly inappropriate in a seventeen-year-old. Officer Tersha saw that she didn’t understand the quality of what she was facing, and saw, too, that she didn’t want to understand it. She suddenly wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
She stood up. “Well, that will be all, Cyr Diamond,” she said, “please limit your time strictly to what’s on your pass and enjoy-your-stay-on-Baret-Station.”
“Thank you, Officer Tersha.”
He started to leave. She said, “Wait a minute! How did you know my name?”
“It’s on your lapel pin.” He pointed to the round decoration at her throat with its random scattering of dots and whorls.
“But that’s in modular machine language.”
“I know.”
She reached out blankly, coded open the door, and watched him walk out of detention, onto the station proper.
Well, why not? She was within the scope of her job. He was right, he wasn’t going to blow the place up. These interviews were a formality, to push the incomings and see if anything shook loose;
